Reflecting on sacrifices year-round

Remembrance Day brings the country together for a moment of reflection of the sacrifices made for our freedoms. But what about ethical questions raised when we think about war?

The answers we sometimes don’t get. While Remembrance Day is important, these are questions we should be thinking about year round.

The search for questions – and answers – should start with Anthony Beever, one of my favourite history writers. To me, Beevor is best when he takes one story or episode and expounds on it. Take Stalingrad, first published in 1998, it features Beevor’s ability to combine details of military strategy with personal stories, all with a compelling narrative style second to none. He does it again in The Fall of Berlin and to a lesser extent in D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. It’s an approach that has come to dominate historical non-fiction, but in the Second World War this approach just creates a sense of discontinuity. It’s akin to the juggler with too many balls in the air: mesmerizing yet prone to failure. I have to admit a sense of disappointment overall. Sections of the book that take in areas he’s written about previously are by far the best though.

Ian Kershaw, who wrote a definitive two-volume biography of Hitler, is another giant of the field. His recent book, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945 takes a different tack than Beevor. Kershaw’s style is more detached, his view more focused on the last part of the European theatre. Kershaw asks the question: why did Germany fight on when it was obvious the war was all but over? The End explores the political, social and institutional structures that allowed the Nazi regime to fight beyond a reasonable end, and towards a scorched earth policy that would have left Germany utterly devastated had some of Hitler’s underlings not followed his edicts. In all, it’s also a compelling read of fanaticism and moral depravity.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a gut-wrenching read that looks specifically at the killings done in the area bordered on the west by Germany and Russia in the east from the 1930s Ukrainian famine through the Second World War.

Snyder is not interested in playing a game of which dictator was the most heinous. Instead, he tries to understand why this area was seen as a place that the enormous visions of Stalin and Hitler could be constructed. Fourteen million people lost their lives in this geographical locale, and Snyder does his best to take this horrific number and make it understandable in terms of individual lives.

If you’re looking for grand insight or controversy you may find Heike B Görtemaker’s, Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, a finely researched book that spends most of its time debunking myths that have grown up around Eve Braun being too cautious or academic. In this book, Görtemaker accesses recently available sources to come to grips with Hitler’s only steady companion. What emerges is a clearly anti-Semitic and at times opportunistic portrait of a woman clearly in love with Hitler and his aura. It’s also a portrait of the sycophantic architects tasked willingly to fulfill Hitler’s bloody visions. The book is drier in tone than Snyder, Beevor, or Kershaw, but relevant and worth reading all the same.

These books are available at Cambridge Libraries and Galleries. Philip Robinson is a fiction specialist at Cambridge Libraries and Galleries.